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Romanticism´s turn to subjective experience is based on a new awareness of the language- and media-related complexities of authentic representation. It anticipates modernist concerns and, on a more general note, the linguistic and medial turns of the twentieth century. Following James Chandler´s insight that Romanticism constitutes "a cultural idiom, a whole way of being in the world", the contributions to this volume ask what is specifically modern in this cultural idiom and in how far the modernity of Romanticism depends on ambiguity as a paradigm of modernity as defined in Christoph Bode´s Ästhetik der Ambiguität.

Contributors: Sebastian Domsch, Katharina Rennhak, Mark J. Bruhn, Nicholas Halmi, Ralf Haekel, Frank Erik Pointner, Dennis Weißenfels, Jens Martin Gurr, James Vigus, Cian Duffy, Gerold Sedlmayr, Peter J. Kitson, Frederick Burwick, Michael O´Neill, Angela Esterhammer, Martin Procházka, Ian Duncan, Pascal Fischer, Miroslawa Modrzewska, Stanislaw Modrzewski, Sabrina Sontheimer, Stefanie Fricke, Christoph Reinfandt.

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Contents

Sebastian Domsch and Katharina Rennhak
Introduction: Romantic Ambiguities - Abodes of the Modern 1

I Poetry 19

Mark J. Bruhn
Ambiguity in Affect: The Modernity of Wordsworth´s Lyrical Ballads 21

Nicholas Halmi
Two Types of Wordsworthian Ambiguity 37

Ralf Haekel
´The earth is all before me´: Contingency and Ambiguity
in Milton´s Paradise Lost and Wordsworth´s The Prelude 53

Frank Erik Pointner and Dennis Weißenfels
From Childe Harold to Don Juan: Narrative Ambiguity in Byron´s Major Works 69

Jens Martin Gurr
Views on Violence in Shelley´s Post-Peterloo Prose and Poetry:
Contradiction, Ambivalence, Ambiguity? 83

II Non-Fictional Prose 95

James Vigus
A ´Romantic State of Uncertainty´: William Hazlitt´s ´On Going a Journey´ 97

Cian Duffy
Ambiguity and the Value of ´Literature´:
Thomas De Quincey´s Modernist Commodities 111

Gerold Sedlmayr
The Ambiguous Nature of the Romantic Scientification of Literary Knowledge 125

Peter J. Kitson
´Unexpected Affinities´ and ´Fatal Errors´:
Ambiguities in the Romantic Reception of Confucius 139

III Drama and the Novel 151

Frederick Burwick
The Ambiguity of Time in Romantic Drama 153

Michael O´Neill
Anatomizing Casuistry: Shelley´s The Cenci and the Fate of Analysis 169

Angela Esterhammer
Ambiguous Identities in Hogg´s Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Its Late-Romantic Contexts 181

Martin Procházka
Internalized Apocalypse? Ambiguities of Transcendentalism
in Melville´s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities 193

Ian Duncan
The Novel and the Romantic ´Moment´ 201

IV Afterlives 215

Pascal Fischer
The Sublime: A Category of Ambiguity 217

Miroslawa Modrzewska and Stanislaw Modrzewski
Navigational Approximations in Joseph Conrad´s World at Sea 229

Sabrina Sontheimer
Travelling Ambiguities in the Illustrated Rimes of the Ancient Mariner 241

Stefanie Fricke
Losing and Gaining Ambiguities: First Impressions,
Pride and Prejudice and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries 259

Christoph Reinfandt
The Romantic Paradigm: Ambiguity, Then and Now 279

Contributors 295

Acknowledgements 301

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